


The Art of Disassociation

by rue_for_two



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 17:36:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11560083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rue_for_two/pseuds/rue_for_two
Summary: Disassociation is an artform. Sometimes Isabel Maru knows this.





	The Art of Disassociation

Disassociation is an artform. Isabel knows this. On her more lucid days, she knows how far she is from her self-awareness. On her less lucid days, she knows she solves puzzles. She knows how good she is. Sometimes she knows the puzzles she solves come at a cost, but the rush of solution gets her high nonetheless. When the accompanying guilt hits her, it is its own rush. On her more lucid days, she wants to be crushed by the weight of what she’s done. On her less lucid days, she wants to crush what she’s done by doing worse.  
…

The body before her is inert. Its chest is open, ribcage torn, lungs exposed. Its face is ruined. She would be bothered but all she feels is relief; the image before her replaces the previous one in such complete horror that she drinks it in. The last body, the last ruined face and melted lungs, the last horror – they are all gone. Only this, this moment, this body, are present. She lives in the moment. It will take doing to replace this moment but she knows she can; the next puzzle always supersedes its predecessors. Corpse upon corpse, terror upon terror, Isabel cannot relent for fear of remembering those that came before. Her breath is ragged and her hands shake. In this moment she feels what she has done. She feels it, memorizes the intricacies of this death, internalizes it. Her breathing steadies. Her hands appear before her, drawing a sheet over the corpse. She blinks hard and the corpse becomes yet another memory to carry through life, to atone for. And with that thought, Isabel steps back from herself, her consciousness, her guilt, and relishes the feeling of another puzzle successfully solved.  
…

On her more lucid days, Isabel remembers the first body. The day theory became reality, her life was decided. A poor peasant, worthless by the standards her superiors were convinced of. Ludendorff assured her that his life gained more meaning in death than it ever would have had he lived on. In death, he said, this man was an emblem of their success. Her success. The man had drowned in the gas she created. He drowned on dry land. Isabel was transfixed, frozen. Success, she thought, should be sweeter than this. She excused herself and wept for him. If there was no coming back for this random, unlucky man, then there could be no going back for her. Only greater cruelty would wipe him from her memory. Cause for greater guilt. On her more lucid days, Isabel knows she chose her own undoing.  
…

She cannot stop staring at the first face she ruins. Another random, unlucky person. A woman this time. Not a prisoner of war, not a criminal; simply someone whom luck and timing did not love. She may have been beautiful once, but Isabel can only remember how she looked after. When this memory surfaces through the fog Isabel lives in she is still struck dumb. This memory, this face, is one she can never move past, hard as she tries to outdo it. She remembers the feeling of skin gone leathery, unnaturally warm and cracking. She remembers the blood, the awful mixture of a face and all that used to be hidden by it, the bone and cartilage and muscle. She touches it, savors her repulsion. She kisses the place where the woman’s lips used to be and relishes her disgust. This, she thinks, is the lowest she can ever sink. To do this to a person and to savor the doing – this is enough to last her a lifetime in atonement. She knows this woman’s face will never leave her. The longer she spends examining the body the more she wonders what the woman felt. Isabel usually fights this impulse, this useless wondering; she works to increase her guilt constantly but even she has limits. On this day, she lets the impulse take over. She wonders and wonders what the woman felt in the moments before she died. She realizes that in the most human terms possible, she cannot imagine it. She knows the science, the cold and clinical words to use when describing a person’s face melting off, but she cannot begin to fathom the feelings. If guilt is atonement then she knows what she must do. When Isabel wakes up, her face is searing hot and her hands are restrained. Smiling hurts more than anything she’s ever known but the last thing she remembers before losing consciousness again is smiling. Now she knows the power of her poisons. If atonement is guilt, then she is closer to god than ever before. Now her guilt it is backed by an intimate knowledge of the pain she inflicts. 

When Ludendorff asks about her face, implies it was an accident, Isabel considers the truth. She decides against it. To test if the gas was painful enough, she says. How can one know except to experience it firsthand? This is only half a lie, she thinks. And the half that is a lie gains her merit, notoriety, and a charming new name: Doctor Poison. Disassociation is an artform but it can also be a gift. Now she has a new identity to hide behind. Isabel Maru seeks to atone but Doctor Poison seeks only to destroy.  
…

Doctor Poison’s ideas take shape in Isabel’s hands. Puzzle after puzzle, death after death, she cannot stop. Her hands pull triggers, dig into still-warm corpses, crush idea after idea when it isn’t awful enough. Sometimes her mind catches up with her hands and she thinks that this, this horror, this cruelty, is for a purpose. The more harm she does the more guilt she can feel. The worse the pain she causes the worse her own pain can be. But her mind catches up less and less often. There is a point where even Isabel’s hands stop being her own. Doctor Poison owns them now, controls them, pushes Isabel’s mind back farther and farther from the brink of consciousness. On her less lucid days, she feels that she is two people. On her more lucid days, she feels that she is hardly a person at all anymore. The ultimate disassociation is to forget one’s personhood altogether and Isabel thinks that may not be so bad. People cause pain. People kill people. People die. Ideas are forever. She wants to transcend. She wants to forget the dead, forget Doctor Poison, forget Isabel Maru. She wants to become a concept, unobtrusive, part of history. She begins to wear a mask over half her face. It makes her less obtrusive. Besides, the part of her face the mask covers belongs to Isabel. It belongs to a person who wanted to know the harm she inflicts. This new concept of herself wants nothing to do with that; this new concept wants to exist as far from humanity as possible. On her less lucid days, Isabel is convinced she is a ghost. Ghosts can feel the thrill of sadomasochism too, right?  
…

Work on the war-ending gas is slow and painstaking. It is a puzzle that avoids being solved at all costs. Isabel’s mind is at its sharpest and her self-awareness at its foggiest. She works for days on end, forgets sleep and food; she becomes as close to a concept as she will ever be, permanently attached to her lab and her work. She tests gas after gas, poison after poison; kills person after person, sometimes in partially successful experiments and sometimes in rage and frustration. She forgets to look at them, to commit each one to memory. She forgets everything but the task at hand. This time, it is only after she succeeds that she remembers. A village of ghosts lies far below her in a yellow haze. Isabel remembers herself in this moment and knows her world is about to end. Her guilt chokes her as suddenly as it returns. She stumbles from the castle’s ramparts and finds her way to the loading dock where her greatest horror waits launch. Doctor Poison is screaming for it to take flight as Isabel Maru’s atonement beckons.  
…

When the world explodes Isabel is at her most lucid. She knows that all she has left is to see the plane take flight. If everything is ending then she can commit this one last atrocity and be done. Be left to her quiet, eternal atonement. When the world explodes and Diana stands over her, Isabel knows she deserves this. She deserves whatever is coming. It will be easier, she knows, than living with the last image she created for herself. An entire village drowned on dry land, an airplane sent off into the world to do more of the same. Nothing can surpass this. Maybe she doesn’t deserve death; at her absolute most lucid, she knows she deserves a long, healthy life, every day of which she can spend in atonement. She does not deserve a quick release. This is what Diana gives her. Before she knows what is happening, Isabel is running. She is alive as the world explodes around her. She is no ghost, no concept. She is human, terrified and drenched in sweat, adrenaline coursing through her veins, blood dripping down her chin from an old scar made new. She runs until she can take shelter behind a pile of what looks like scrap metal. She must remain alive to live with her guilt. She knows her burden is to take it by the hand and walk away with it. And she does.


End file.
